"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."
Paul Gaugin (1848 - 1903)
@ Ngujaz: I’m no expert on post impressionism or Gaugin, I’m simply an admirer of his work. If you read what I wrote I wasn’t saying that Gaugin didn’t objectify women, what I said was:
“When we photograph with artistic pretensions we must have other objectives besides what we are asked to do, we must give it soul, we must make it personal, it is us, otherwise a job is just a job and photography becomes commercial, which is ok but then we must assume it as so. For me what made me comment was the succession of photos, from the nudes to the meat in the cup. I see a type of work that is assuming to be something it isn't. When I think of nudes I think of Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Gaugin and Goya.”
Nowhere here is the critique aimed at the fact that those artists don’t objectify women, what they do is make their work personal and original in a way that defies convention and looks at new ways of representation that move away from the clichés of the time.
Gaugin lived and worked more than 100 years ago, through his work he tried to look for new directions in art, through his Tahiti paintings he was documenting a culture and art that was being destroyed by the French colonial army and missionaries. He did it so by challenging the accepted representations of his time, being the 19th century he did it in a sexist way and maybe with a colonial mindset (probably unaware) that we now can frown at and criticize but at the time it was revolutionary and progressive in a whole lot of different aspects.
Since then there have been several revolutions, both in art and society, both in the way we look at our bodies, sex and gender, certain images we’ve grown used to see in publicity, which might have been novel at one stage, have become stereotypes and repetitions. That is my critique of some image makers that still fall into age old clichés and sell it as art.
"The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”
Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989)
